Residential proxies allow a user to interact with the internet in a way that is both highly anonymous and efficient. A residential proxy is linked to a specific location and gives off the appearance of a typical homeowner’s IP address straight from an Internet Service Provider.
Non-residential proxies will generally have a higher block-rate than residential proxies. These proxies, generally distributed through a datacenter, will show up as far less reliable and legitimate to the various websites and services you will interact with.
On the other hand, residential proxies are proud of their identity and legitimacy and suffer a much lower block-rate—making the user’s experience much faster and more reliable. Here are ten different ways you can put residential proxies to work for you.
1. Comparing Prices Online
Competition is getting very stiff in today’s market. Travel sites, E-commerce, and retailers ensure that they offer the best prices for their products to stay a step ahead of others in the same line of business. If these websites detect that their competitors are accessing their site, they may relay the wrong information to maintain price competitiveness.
Having a residential proxy is the most appropriate solution to this issue. It helps you appear as a customer and not a threat to your competitors. This will allow you to collect usable real-time data regardless of your location without getting blocked and while maintaining anonymity
2. Protecting Your Brand
Your brand is what keeps you in the market, and if you cannot protect it, then you might incur significant losses. Creating a logo, innovation, brand, and idea is a time-consuming process, not to mention making the brand recognized in the market. After all this effort, it would be deplorable if some other individual or company reproduces, resells, or misuses your materials.
Such piracy has become a considerable threat to many brands, and the pirates of nowadays are smart in concealing their tracks. A residential proxy will help you appear as a regular customer and avoid being misled by the pirates. A good quality residential proxy will bypass any particular defense that these nefarious individuals have developed in order to keep you in the dark.
You will also have the option to access data in the geolocation of your choice in order to see if your copyrighted material is being used in ways that will negatively affect your brand.
3. Market Research
The primary significance of market research is to get a clear glimpse of the current economic environment. As a business owner, you might feel the need to venture into international markets if you want to see your business grow. This research is very vital for any business, whether it is entering a new market or trying to stay ahead of the competitors.
There may be no online boundaries when it comes to carrying out such research. However, you should be vigilant about the customers and competitors in the new location that you are targeting. This will help you gather accurate, unbiased, and reliable information. Using a residential IP guarantees accurate research data as the proxy routes your requests through the local IPs in your preferred geolocation.
4. Ad Verification
Ad networks are challenging to run. You are required to test ad localization in several countries to achieve a global reach through your mobile devices. Moreover, companies that run ad verification should ensure that they avoid all IP blocks that appear on their servers that deal with ad fraud or those that do not display the ads correctly.
It is essential to ensure that the ads running on publisher websites are appropriately placed, affiliate links are verified, and the absence of malware is guaranteed. Feeding inaccurate information to the competitors has become a norm for those who indulge in fraudulent undertakings. When you use a residential IP, you appear as a regular customer in the geolocation that your online campaign is targeting—this ensures that the campaign data is accurately verified.
Website testing is an imperative process for developers, engineers, quality analysts, and website release managers. Doing so from your local computer can present an overwhelming challenge. Besides adapting the site’s content, ads and any 3rd party data are also adapted by most websites’ content that takes into consideration the user’s location.
The success of a website is promoted by ensuring the top-notch performance of the codes, web, sites, and ads applications. The first step to website testing is making sure that the environment and parameters are accurate. You will be required to mimic a real user for you to create the perfect website testing environment.
The accuracy and simplicity of the website testing process are promoted by having the right automation tools to use with a proxy network service. Besides testing by different geolocations, you should also test by different IP types, including Residential, Mobile, and Data Center.
5. SEO Monitoring
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is very vital to any business that handles its operations online. Companies need to understand how they rank and if their content is seen in the appropriate locations and languages. This is what could bring the difference between a successful and unsuccessful business.
There are borders when it comes to accessing cities, countries, and other locations via the internet. However, having the right IP will ensure that accuracy is maintained whether you are checking your rank, local listings, online translation, or using the mobile-first Google index. Using a residential IP conceals your identity and presents you as a regular user. Make the effort of getting this proxy today and see how simple it is to handle SEO monitoring. Using the standard IP address will lead to you being blocked when researching your competitors.
6. Extracting Web Data
Unlike before, when web data was readily available to different businesses, today, you have to indulge in data gathering. Having the right and appropriate data helps you to understand what products are needed by the customers. It also ensures that you remain competitive in the dynamic business world.
To achieve that, you need to ensure that the data you collect is viable and accurate to promote your business’s growth. Extracting web data involves activities such as:
- Getting legal knowledge by scanning public records
- Gathering people data through social media scraping
- Gathering online information from different websites for pricing intelligence.
With such a wide variety of ways of web data extraction, you might be overwhelmed with choosing the right one that will be most effective for your operations. However, regardless of the type and amount of data to be collected, the thumb rule is ensuring what you gather is accurate. Technology has advanced significantly over the past few years, and getting data from websites is not simple anymore.
Most sites have IP based, bot-based, and other blocking techniques that may limit the access to the data that you require. To avoid being blocked and get the right data, you need to appear as a regular customer. When you buy residential proxies, you will automatically become anonymous in your selected geolocation. The anonymity will ensure that you collect accurate and viable data and avoid blockades.
7. Gathering Stock Market Data
Investing in the stock market is a very lucrative business idea. However, it would help if you had the right facts because any inaccuracy can have very harsh consequences on your investment. The information you gather should be 100 percent authentic and certain using a data collection platform, whether you are using internal sources, external sources, or compiling several sources.
When collecting data on the stock market, ensure that you intensely scrutinize lenders and creditors. Additionally, you are required to conduct intensive background checks to ensure that you are conversant with the stock market investment and opportunities.
Experts in the technological field have developed proxy networks that guarantee the collection of accurate stock market data. Today, you can anonymously gather accurate information from the internet by using a residential IP address that allows you to appear as a regular customer.
8. Travel Fare Aggregation
Travelling is one of the most important aspects of a business. You need to know different prices for different airlines, hotels, car hire companies, and Online Travel Agencies, among others. However, most of these companies will automatically block you from gathering such information. This is because they are constantly checking and ensuring that their competitors do not access their websites.
Such companies will then feed the wrong information to you to maintain their competitive power in the market. Using a residential IP address will make such companies think that you are a regular client, probably the type that they are looking for. This means that you will get the right and accurate information every time and avoid being blocked by these websites.
9. Link Testing
Wrong affiliate links, malicious websites, and bad affiliates are some of the factors that can cause you to lose your customers and earn a negative reputation. A fast and reliable proxy network is vital when it comes to testing and checking your affiliate links.
Residential IP addresses should be used when checking local affiliate content using an IP address that targets specific geolocation. It should also be used to mask your IP address and keep track of your affiliates so that they do not engage in anything suspicious.
You want high-quality residential proxies that are very unlikely to be blocked. This will ensure that you avoid bans, blockades, and captchas that may hinder the smooth link testing process.
10. Gaming
Residential proxies are becoming increasingly popular for gamers and game developers who must bypass region restrictions, automate in-game currency farming or hide their IP address. Residential proxies are distributed through a specific location and mask the user’s actual IP address, making it appear as if they are a typical homeowner.
Bypassing region restrictions is particularly useful for gamers who want access to content unavailable in their region. Residential proxies provide gamers with the anonymity and security they need to access this restricted content and any other content they may be interested in. Residential proxies also allow gamers to engage in in-game currency farming, enabling them to accumulate more resources than average players without getting detected by the game’s developers.
Finally, residential proxies can automate various game processes that would otherwise take too long or be too tedious for gamers to do manually. For example, some games require players to create multiple accounts and use different IP addresses to gain certain rewards. Residential proxies can help automate this process, saving gamers time and money. By using residential proxies for gaming, gamers can enjoy a seamless gaming experience with fewer blocks and better online identity protection.
Factors to Consider when Buying a Residential Proxy
From the above description, we can say that having a Residential IP address helps you avoid blockades, bans, and restrictions while collecting online data. You can find this service from different providers at a fair price. However, before you cough out any money to any supplier, ensure that you consider the following factors:
Paid vs. Free
Some providers offer free proxies that are quite affordable to almost every internet user. However, the reliability and anonymity of such IP addresses cannot be compared to those of the paid proxies. You might be exposed to scams as most of the free proxies are shared, and the majority of them do not work.
This is not the case with paid proxies. The providers are legitimate, and you can be sure to get working proxies always. Moreover, you can request a replacement if the proxy develops some issues. It is much safer to buy residential proxies than using free ones.
Pricing
Your needs and requirements are different from those of your competitors when you want to buy residential proxies. Providers of Residential IP addresses charge per gigabyte (GB). The basic rule is that the amount you pay depends on how much traffic goes through your proxy.
Watch out for providers who promise unlimited traffic. Their proxies may be unstable or very slow, with several timeouts and server errors. However, if you have a tight budget and speed is not your primary concern, then you can purchase the unlimited traffic proxies as they are cheaper.
Provider Legitimacy
Like with any other product, there also exist scammers in the name of proxy providers. Legitimate companies are available, but it is your responsibility to look for them. If you are not sure that a particular provider is legitimate, I advise you to check the reviews they get from their customers.
Device integration
It is advisable to get a residential IP address that can easily be integrated with the devices or browser that you intend to use.
Proxy Location
Besides knowing your location, you should also understand the geographic scope covered by the IP addresses offered by your proxy of choice. Some of these proxies available today cover an extensive range of almost all known countries’ IPs. Additionally, you should comprehend the laws that dictate how companies should operate in a particular country.
Final Thoughts
Every day you are faced with restrictions, blockades, and bans whenever you want to gather some information from different websites. Residential proxies are an excellent way to circumnavigate these annoyances. These proxies will hide your location, give you maximum anonymity, and guarantee access to accurate data from the websites.
We have seen ten of the most popular uses of residential IP addresses, including price comparison, collecting information about the stock market, conducting market research, and ad verification, among others. Therefore, you have detailed content on how important residential proxies are.
In today’s technological world, different providers of this service have come up, and they are readily available. Nevertheless, the main question is ‘how do you identify a legitimate residential IP address provider?’ All the providers deal with their customers over the internet.
It is very easy to identify a legitimate provider from the reviews that they get from their customers. To avoid falling victim to a scam, it is your responsibility to conduct in-depth research on different providers to ensure that you purchase from a reliable and legit one. The best providers to work with are companies who operate as a legal entity.
This is because such a company will be held liable for any legal issues that may arise while you use their services. While on it, I would also recommend you check out other factors, including the pricing range, if the proxy is compatible with your devices and browser settings, and the area covered by the proxy of your choice.